Modern Slaves of Dubai: The workers are waiting for the bus to bring them back to the camp after a hard day of work in the heat of Dubai.
The theme of this week’s reading is social mobility and dream. Las Vegas and Dubai are man-made modern marvels that demonstrate humans’, or say, capitalists’ endeavor in exploiting every resources in sight. However, with relatively more civilization and sanity, America’s creation of Las Vegas has created a comfortable home for Dave Hickey (author of Air Guitar) and thousands of happiness pursuers. However, Dubai in contrast is described as a “Devil Paradise”, where megalomania has been materialized with no restraints.
Las Vegas and Dubai are cities built on purely fantasy. Their appeals lie in their very conception. Illogical and boisterous, the births of Las Vegas and Dubai draw on our search for something exotic, distant and different. The more different the desert city is from the mundane city that one is living in, the more appeal it carries. The physical and geographical difference is directly linked to the development potentials. Its separation from pre-establishment nurtures a sense of venture and guilt-free sins. The deserts are a blank canvas, waiting to be drawn on, freely.
Making a desert habitable requires a lot of human and natural resources. In Las Vegas, there is exploitation in nature in irrigating a desert city. In At Home in the Neon, the hopeful. residents of Las Vegas find comfort in the Sin City because they are being accepted. Yet in Dubai, there is not only exploitation in nature but also in labor force and in laws. Doubtlessly Dubai has all the freedom it needs it is almost like playing SIMS City in real life. To supply labor force to build Dubai an ancient but almost extinct trade remerged – the slave trade. Putting Las Vegas and Dubai side by side for comparison, Las Vegas is more habitable for its openness to culture and social mobility; at least the work force is not slaves. Moreover, with the hope of moving up the social rank, they could start fostering a sense of belonging to a place. Unluckily in Dubai, where laws could be changed casually to tailor to the profits of the international investments, hopes of the work force extinguish.
Who cares about workers’ lives while the millionaires ski in a refrigerated dome?
Las Vegas people would feel at home because of being accepted and having a common ground. Yet in Dubai the gap between the rich and the poor is huge. People in the conception of the devil paradise adopt a capitalist mode of everything is weighted on profit motive. Flexible measures such as exemption from legal enforcement and lawful exploitation are all justified by the drive to develop. Human basic values are thrown out of the windows at the cost of capitalism as being the golden rule.
Doubtlessly designing the very iconic Burj Dubai will gain Dubai and its architects a place in the world record and the front-page. However as ethical practitioners, we must also consider the logistics and the system of creating architecture. City planners and architects’ duty does not merely stay at completing ever-growing towers and the biggest city in an extreme environment. The focus on the symbolic significance of the biggest and the tallest must be curbed by environmental awareness, human right condition, availability of resources and the happiness of its citizens.
No justice. Only privilege in Dubai.
The thinkers (architects, financiers, oil tycoons) who are on the privilege side need to reassess justice not on the scale of dollar sign, but of morality, social equality and environmental impact.
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